Wretched Wicked

by S. M. Reine

  That was where he met his father, Werner Friederling. Fritz had seen Werner once or twice in passing prior to that. He had aged little over the years, remaining a strong-backed man with eyes like shards of glass.

  Werner strolled through Fritz’s private room, picking up trinkets that his son had built in shop class, rearranging the top of his desk, and rolling his eyes at book titles. Werner behaved as though he owned it all, because he did. He held stake in the school. He bought the suits Fritz wore to class. His sperm had donated a portion of the genetics within Fritz.

  Nothing was Fritz’s, and everything was Werner’s, including the boy’s legacy.

  “You’re a kopis,” Werner had said, taking the seat at Fritz’s desk. He gestured magnanimously to the bed to indicate where Fritz should sit.

  Fritz did not sit. “What’s a kopis, Father?”

  Werner’s golden brows drew to meet in the middle. “You’ve noticed you’re stronger than the other boys. Faster. Heal better. Superior reflexes. Haven’t you?”

  Of course, Fritz had. He’d yet to meet a human who wasn’t physically inferior to him in all ways.

  “That’s because you’re a kopis,” Werner said. “It’s a special class of gaean created by the Treaty of Dis to protect humanity. I’m a kopis too. Your grandfather was a kopis, and his father was a kopis. Your son will be the same.”

  “What does it mean?” Fritz asked. “Am I called to an army?”

  “There’s no army of kopides. They work independently. They fight alone. They die young and get replaced by another. It’s uncommon for a kopis to see thirty.”

  Fritz surveyed his father, surely much older than thirty and still alive. “Why are the Friederlings special in this?”

  “Because we’re always special,” Werner said. “We don’t fight on the front lines. We’re too valuable, you see.”

  “It sounds like cowardice to me.”

  Werner reached into his jacket pocket and tossed a yellowed book to Fritz. The title was Lolita. “The hero of that book there is seduced by a sinful, filthy girl.”

  Repulsed, Fritz moved the book to the bedside table. He had read it with his literature tutor and was well familiar with the story. “That hero’s a child rapist.”

  “He wrote the book,” Werner said, “so he’s a victim of the girl’s seduction.”

  “There are no kopides in that book, Father.”

  “Engage your mind. Think less literally. My point is that we write our stories. We’re not cowards, Fritz. We’re kings who strategize for the pawns on the chessboard.” Werner rose to pick up the book. His father was not nearly as tall as Fritz remembered. “People on the outside will have other narratives for our experiences, but remember, we are heroes. Friederlings are always something worth preserving.”

  “Then I suppose I am lucky in that respect, to have the kopis powers without the burden of death,” Fritz said.

  “The burden remains,” Werner said. “You’ll watch your loved ones die before you can kill the demons, and you’ll live a long time to regret the memories.”

  His father said farewell by gripping him on the shoulder. There was emotion in Werner’s eyes for once—Fritz thought that was emotion, though eyes had a deceptive way of being mirrors—but his lips were silent, and he only gave a single nod before dropping his hand.

  Isobel Stonecrow’s report was accurate. Cèsar Hawke had killed a woman, and he was on the run.

  “Guess you never really know a guy,” said Janet from Forensics, wiggling her fingers into latex gloves. She’d already covered her shoes in booties, ensuring that she wouldn’t contaminate the evidence scattered across the floor.

  There was a body in Cèsar’s bath tub. The victim’s name was Erin Karwell, and she had worked at the Olive Pit. She was not one of the waitresses that Fritz had fucked. At least, he didn’t think so. He seldom looked at his sexual partners’ faces.

  Her murder had been violent. It showed in the handprints on her throat, the blood spilled, and the disarray in Cèsar’s apartment.

  When Fritz stood over Erin Karwell, he could not help but remember his father’s warnings. You’ll watch your loved ones die before you can kill the demons, and you’ll live a long time to regret the memories. He had no memories of Erin Karwell to regret, but he had stood over his dead wife like this too—his Emmeline, his Belle, murdered by a client. He’d seen her bloodless face with flawless makeup like this. He’d held her cooling body. He remembered it years after the incident, so vividly that he feared he was about to see it again.

  Cèsar Hawke had killed Erin Karwell.

  The OPA had little patience for employees who crossed lines, and this would qualify as a line regardless of motive. Erin must have tried to kill Cèsar or a loved one first. There was no doubt in Fritz’s mind about this, not even for a moment. Yet upper management at the OPA wouldn’t care enough to hear the reasons.

  Indeed, his BlackBerry was ringing at the moment. Lucrezia de Angelis, Vice President of the organization, wanted Fritz’s attention.

  Fritz was about to watch Cèsar die. One more person he would outlive and remember.

  He answered the phone. “Lucrezia,” he said.

  “Fritz,” she said. “Cèsar Hawke has escaped police custody. Find him.” She hung up, but Fritz was barely a heartbeat behind her, and only another heartbeat elapsed before he was calling Agent Takeuchi to track Cèsar down before Lucrezia could.

  It had been years since Lucrezia de Angelis last showed her face in Los Angeles. Even when she hadn’t loathed Fritz, they had only ever rendezvoused outside the city, far from the Office of Preternatural Affairs or other business interests. Lucrezia used to tell everyone she knew that the de Angelis family and the Friederling family would become a united dynasty because of the marriage between them. Fritz had always been very careful to use condoms while having sex with her.

  Terminating his sexual relationship with Lucrezia meant she seldom communicated with Fritz directly. Some bitter ex-girlfriends would burn a man’s clothes or slash his tires. Lucrezia had arranged for one of her businesses to forcibly acquire a Friederling business, then tanked it, along with the stock in most other Friederling businesses. He’d lost a fraction of his billions. She couldn’t have been more repulsive spitting into his eye.

  The first time they met after that incident had been when Fritz hired Cèsar to the OPA.

  It had been Cèsar’s first week in training—a month-long process akin to bootcamp. Fritz had checked in on his new trainee most days, mostly because he had still been enjoying the novelty of spying on Cèsar first-hand rather than through a scrying ball.

  On the Friday that Lucrezia came to town, Fritz had been startled to find her waiting for him in the bleachers overlooking the Union’s indoor track. Not least of all because, in a fur-lined white jacket and red-soled stilettos, she was dressed more elaborately than anyone else in the gymnasium.

  If Lucrezia had been one of Fritz’s male business rivals, he’d have responded to that invasion with his fists. She was not a man, and she was, unfortunately, allowed to be there. The Vice President could go anywhere she wanted, much to Fritz’s irritation.

  “It’s time for you to pick an aspis,” Lucrezia told him as they watched Union officers and OPA agents race around the track. They thundered past the bleachers, a near-uniform clump.

  Fritz lounged insolently against a railing. “I told you before, I’m not going to be pushed into a pairing like other OPA kopides. I’ll pick an aspis when I pick an aspis.”

  And he would never pick an aspis.

  Fritz had only ever known two witches he could begin considering as aspides. His dead wife, Emmeline, would have been perfect as an aspis, but her powers had been limited to necrocognition, and it took a witch skilled at ritual to perform the binding.

  “When I hired you to this agency, I made it clear you would need to bind an aspis,” Lucrezia said.

  “And I’ve never been ambiguous about my feelings on this or any ot
her matter.” Including the fact that he’d never marry Lucrezia to combine their empires.

  Her eyes glimmered darkly. “Then why did you hire him?”

  Cèsar Hawke was running the track, sweat flying off his forehead, lingering neither in the front nor the back of the pack. He was solidly in the middle. Everyone seemed to cluster around him as if drawn by gravity.

  “He showed aptitude,” Fritz said. “I hire suspects all the time when they look to be useful. It’s policy.”

  “You never watch their training this closely. And you’ve never spent as much time scouting someone as you did him. Your scrying logs are embarrassing if you don’t plan to make him aspis,” she said.

  Cèsar had tripped into a Union officer who looked baffled by how profusely the new hire was apologizing. They ended up laughing together. They picked up their pace and ran at the back of the pack together.

  Fritz had decided in that moment that he would never make an aspis of the man. Cèsar Hawke didn’t deserve to be stuck with a Friederling.

  Cèsar was almost too good a detective. After murdering Erin Karwell, the man who couldn’t keep mustard stains off his tax paperwork became elusive in the streets of Los Angeles, and Fritz immediately lost track of him.

  This should not have been an issue. Cèsar had been in LAPD custody—a safe enough place for him to wait until Fritz could fabricate the paperwork required to free him. But the police had not expected to detain a witch with magically augmented strength, and they’d barely realized he’d torn the window off his cell before Cèsar was over the fence.

  The ensuing whack-a-mole search was charmingly frustrating. Fritz kept arriving at scenes after Cèsar had already left: at the Olive Pit, where he’d been questioning potential witnesses; at a cemetery, where he’d absconded with Isobel Stonecrow to advance the investigation; at a library, where Cèsar’s mysteriously pustule-riddled face had terrified several patrons. (It later turned out that Isobel had cursed Cèsar in their brief encounter, as Isobel had mistakenly feared for her life.)

  He shouldn’t have wasted the effort.

  “There’s someone at the gates, sir,” said the butler, stepping into the room where a tailor was fitting Fritz with a new suit.

  “I don’t take visitors when I’m about to go into the office,” Fritz said. But he held out his hand for the tablet anyway, just so he could see who was on his security cameras.

  Expert fugitive, Cèsar Hawke, was leaning on the fence, looking rumpled, exhausted, and dirty.

  Fritz had barely a spare thought for what his distant celebrity neighbors must have thought about a murder suspect stumbling to his front gates. He swept Cèsar inside the amniotic safety of the Friederling mansion—nearly a city-state unto itself, immune from mundane police enforcement.

  Fritz said, “I wish you had come to me when you left the police station.”

  Cèsar looked so grim. “Would have made your job easier, huh?”

  “I might have been able to help you,” Fritz said levelly.

  “I don’t think there’s any helping me now.” Cèsar glared hatred at his own hands—the hands that had formed the imprint of bruises on Erin Karwell’s neck, as verified by Janet’s measurements.

  “You’re a good agent, Cèsar. I don’t have many good agents under me—and fewer that I can trust.” None that would fire a bullet to save Fritz Friederling, their boss, who was loathed at worst and tolerated at best. He swallowed against the harsh scrape of dryness in his throat. “I’d hate to lose you.”

  “I’ve always appreciated my job,” Cèsar said, ducking his head. “But you didn’t send anybody to pick me up from the 77th Street station. I figured you’d written me off.”

  “The paperwork takes time. You’d never have gone to trial.” Also true. Fritz would have rather had his witches blow memory spells through the brains of half of Los Angeles’s judicial system than let Cèsar slip beyond his grasp.

  Suzume Takeuchi was a convenient fall guy. Circumstances made her look guilty anyway, and Fritz had no love for the sarcastic, dick-drawing deskmate that Cèsar found so endearing.

  Fritz sent her to the same facility as Black Jack, and he planned to give her as little thought as the witch who’d been detained before her. The distraction of her detention meant that Cèsar got away Scot-free.

  Almost Scot-free.

  In the end, it was not a dramatic incident that closed the trap around Cèsar’s throat. It was an accident. Months later, Fritz was abducted by a werewolf (not a huge cause for worry), and Cèsar panicked. He used Fritz’s BlackBerry to call Lucrezia de Angelis for help. And that was that.

  “We have such careful information security rules,” Lucrezia said, looking pleased as a cat with nip, “that I’m afraid we’re going to have to terminate Cèsar Hawke’s contract with the Office of Preternatural Affairs.”

  And that had left only one route for Fritz to protect Cèsar’s employment, life, and memory. The same route that Fritz could have used to get Black Jack out of detention.

  “Have you chosen him?” asked Lucrezia de Angelis.

  And Fritz said, very casually, “I have.”

  “I’ve never thought about being an aspis before,” Cèsar said.

  Fritz and Cèsar were at the Friederling mansion again, discussing their possible change in relationship status. The rapid change of events had shifted the hues in the world; lazy Los Angeles summertime felt like a feline in the moments before pouncing. The heat was sticky, and no amount of wealth could keep Fritz from sweltering on the golf course.

  “Think about it now,” Fritz said. “Think hard, Hawke. This is your life.” He swung the club. Its angled face met the ball, and the ball soared into the air, vanishing against scalded blue.

  Cèsar watched it go, as if he could somehow see it all the way to the sixteenth hole on the bottommost terrace. He managed to look as though he glistened rather than sweated. Good genetics were something money could not buy—yet—and the Hawke family had it in spades.

  Taste was possible to purchase, though. Cèsar hadn’t had any appropriate golf attire, so he wore Nike shorts and a House Stark t-shirt for the moment, showing exactly how little money the man had invested in taste. Fritz would ensure he had a new wardrobe soon. And then, if Fritz made sure to drink enough brandy, Cèsar almost wouldn’t look like an innocent dragged into the tarnished Friederling world. He’d look like he belonged.

  “This is my life now,” Cèsar mused, squinting against the sunlight as he swung another golf club like a sword. “Ha. Domingo would give me shit forever if he saw me doing this old-man stuff.”

  “Old-man stuff? Golf is a precision sport,” Fritz said. “Importantly, it’s a language of business. I don’t maintain this skill for fun but for socializing with business partners. You’ll need to learn it too.”

  “Can’t I just serve canapés and carry your golf clubs?”

  “You’re going to be my aspis, not my servant. That means we’re on near-level footing.”

  Cèsar stared around at the golf course with a scoffing laugh. This was Fritz’s private course at his Beverly Hills Mansion. It had uniquely difficult landscaping, changed frequently by dedicated staff to ensure his skills remained on point. The green glittered.

  “I haven’t even wiped the toothpaste off my faucet in two years,” Cèsar said. “You’ve got one guy whose whole job is to get golf balls out of a pond.”

  “What’s mine is yours. We’re bound indefinitely if you choose to see this through.”

  “What’s the other choice?” Cèsar asked. “Forgetting everything from the last few years? I’d rather eat uncooked donkey balls than have my mind screwed with like that.”

  Then uncooked donkey balls were on par with being trapped as Fritz’s aspis. “Losing a few years is better than a lifelong commitment you can’t reverse,” Fritz said tightly. “And if you do become an aspis, you must know that this means change.”

  Cèsar shrugged. “Sure.”

  He wasn’t really thin
king about it. Didn’t he realize how bad things would be tied to the Friederling legacy?

  But Fritz was too selfish to make Cèsar see the truth.

  He fished around in a side pocket on his golf bag then handed Cèsar the box he withdrew. “Happy birthday.”

  “Whoa.” Cèsar hooked a finger in the wristband of the watch, lifting it out of the box. It was so glimmery-bright that it reflected gold against his irises. “Holy crap, look at this!” There was obvious glee in his face as he put the watch on, figuring out how to settle the clasp just right against the pulse inside his wrist, and Fritz watched him without smiling somehow. Cèsar’s joy was more infectious than the venom of Lilith’s Curse.

  “It’s a reminder that your life will change as my aspis,” Fritz said. “And most of those changes will be much more jarring than the watch, unfortunately.”

  Cèsar’s eyes narrowed. “Wait, how expensive was this watch?”

  Fritz shrugged and named a sum of money that was meaningless to him. He low-balled it, knowing the actual value would stagger Cèsar.

  Even the smaller amount made him look nervous. “This is great, man. I just don’t know if I can accept a gift like that.”

  “I earn thrice that in a minute collecting interest,” Fritz said. “It’s not as though I can walk into Walmart to get you a tacky tie.”

  “That’s what I want for my birthday next year.” Cèsar held up his wrist to appreciate it with the watch in place. “I’m going with you to Walmart.”

  Fritz dropped his club into his golf bag.

  Next year. That assumed that Cèsar would be alive to see the next year.

  Falling into Fritz’s orbit meant, after all, that Cèsar was going to die.